Setting out

Home Sweet Home:


The Monster Bike:

Kelli writes:

We finally headed out of Sandpoint on Sunday afternoon, August 16th. The last week was pretty challenging as it was tough to gauge how long it would take to get things completed. We were pretty optimistic that we would be done on Thursday, then Saturday, but we ran out of steam around 10 pm Sat night, and went at it again the next day. Even though we likely won't walk away with much money when it sells, it still feels good to leave with the house completed and looking good.

We had several stops on our way through Coeur d' Alene, and made it to Lookout Pass, 113 miles from Sandpoint, some 6 hours later. We parked overnight in the Lookout Pass ski area parking lot, and it proved to be a very quiet night as we were the only ones in the parking lot.

The next morning, after eating breakfast, making a sack lunch, cleaning the kitchen, and pumping up the bike tires with air, (all of which seemed to take forever) we headed 7 miles down the road in the truck to bike the Hiawatha trail. The Hiawatha Trail is a rails-to-trails bike path that travels downhill about 15 miles, through 9 tunnels, the longest of which is about 2 miles - in complete darkness!

Mark, Kenna & I rode in tandem with our trikes attached and Erika pulled behind in the trailer. The boys were riding their own bikes. We did well until just after the halfway point. The gravel road was really bumpy and the vibration seemed to loosen up a lot of things on our bikes. Blake's light that we bought to go through the tunnels kept falling off, and my water bottle came out of it's holder. The second time my water bottle jumped out, it startled me and I yelled out at the same time that I started to brake. Mark reacted to my holler, and also hit his brake at about the same time that he turned a little to the left. It was then that we learned that his tire had worked itself loose, because the braking and turning combined to release his front tire. Since we were all in a chain and travelling about 9 miles an hour downhill, the bikes kept moving even without the front tire. The end result was a bent fork and bent axle. As we were just past the midpoint, it was a really bad time to break down. Fortunately, Mark was able bend the axle and the fork back enough to attach his trike to mine, so I became the lead and we continued on our journey, albeit a little more cautiously.

We spent the next 2 nights in Missoula, and in searching for a bike shop to help repair his bent fork, Mark happened upon Free Cycles, a community organization which recycles unwanted bikes, bike parts, and provides shop space for people to work on their own bicycles. The kids were totally enthralled with the pile of bikes, rims, gears and the like, but especially with the skate bike, which looked a lot like a unicycle except it had 2 little wheels in front to stabalize it, and the green garden bike, a monstrous 3 seater bike-car. In the end, Mark's fork could not be safely repaired, so while we are waiting for a new one to arrive from Australia where they are manufactured, he and the helpful guy Jeff, fashioned a new fork to make due for now. We were all so inspired by this community bike effort that we made a special trip to the hardware store to purchase a few of the tools that seem to walk out more frequently and dropped them off to them before we left town, continuing on our eastward journey.